Just do it somewhere away from me.
Seriously, I’m tired of dealing with you people. The annoyance of realizing 20 minutes after meeting someone that he could be summed up in one short statement is kind of depressing. I don’t need to deal with that, and besides maybe if all of you formed your own town somewhere it could finally prove some nice little debates that I’ve had. “If the entire town is NPCs, then when no PCs are around does the town cease to exist, or just the people in it? Or maybe they can achieve this kind of half life thing where they’re all observing each other, even.”
Continued on page E7-
In case you’re having trouble deciding whether you yourself are an NPC, here are some easy tricks you can use to figure it out:
1) You only have one distinguishing trait, something that you can easily imagine being on a list of 100 character attributes, such as:
01: Verbal tick (says Eh? as a verbal emphasis constantly)
02: Emo
03: Constantly eats a specific type of junk food (cheetos, animal crackers, etc.)
04: Purpetually has the same conversation.(typically Star Wars, Star Trek, a sports team, a band, etc.)
05: B.O. that could stun a Magic player
and so on for another 95 entries.
Exception: Some lucky NPCs get to roll twice, once on the personality trait table and once on the physical trait table. So don’t get your hopes too high if you think you have two different traits.
2) You occasionally think to yourself that meeting you would be an amusing or otherwise entertaining brief interlude in a bar/cantina/nightclub for a plucky band of unique individuals.
3) You have a single skill that is amazingly useful, but only in a limited set of circumstances, causing small groups of plucky individuals to seek out your aid. Of course, you never see or hear from those individuals again, since they only needed your skill for that one occasion, thereby explaining why they didn’t have the skill themselves.
4) No one ever calls you by name. Ever. There is a distinct impression that everyone thinks of you as the living embodiment of either the single trait you rolled off of the table, or the valuable skill that you have.
5) You cease to exist when other people aren’t around.
This one is the biggie. If you find yourself not existing whenever there is no one around to interact with, then it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that you’re an NPC.
If you happen to realize that you’re an NPC, don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world. There are plenty of places for your kind. Just look at Idaho and Wisconsin.
Both of those are states that are practically NPCs themselves. Idaho has a valuable skill that no one wants, namely Growing Potato(e)s, and Wisconsin has a verbal tick of saying “Ay?” constantly.
Of course I think that answers the earlier questions about what happens when a city is full of NPCs. They all get to observe each other and exist in a quasi-real state of potato-Fargoism, exporting things that people need but don’t really care about.
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